Raw meat and real talk about wellness marketing

In today’s blog, we’re diving into a fun, if somewhat radical, moment from my history…hitchhiking around Hawai’i and discovering the Primal Diet, a raw food version of the now-popular Paleo diet.

And most importantly, how this quirky part of my story relates to your brand and the wellness marketing you create as an integral, successful clinician.

My first taste of Pangaia and…raw meat

At 20, I decided that living life as a tree-sitting (vegan) anarchist in Eugene, OR, was not weird enough for me.

So I dropped out of school entirely (because, let’s be honest, my anarchical aspirations kept me out of class most days as it was) and bought a one-way ticket to the Big Island of Hawai’i. (By the way, this is all 100% true.)

I brought a backpack and the money I’d saved painting frat houses on Alder Street (if you’re familiar with Eugene), and I landed in Kona, HI, sometime in the fall of 2003.

I hitchhiked around Mamalahoa Hwy, and y’all, it was pretty magical.

Loads of mangos and bananas lined the roadside (be still my then-vegan heart!), and drivers were used to picking up vagabond hippy kids such as myself.

Thanks to a tip from a friend in Oregon, I made my way to Pangaia, a permaculture-cum-raw food commune on the East side of Hawai’i, about 10 miles south of Pahoa down on Papaya Farms Road.

The only catch with the raw food side of things at Pangaia was that community members had long ago abandoned veganism.

 

They were full-fledged disciples of the Primal Diet…a 100% raw diet consisting of meat (yep, including pork and poultry), eggs, milk, and the usual raw suspects like fruits and veggies.

I was…shocked?

A little grossed out?

I was mostly glad for a consistent place to stay as I’d been on the road since arriving on the island.

Plus, the people seemed cool, and admittedly, there were some cute boys.

So began my new understanding of nutrition.

 

Over the next four years, I was introduced to many new ideas.

My first glimpse of Nourishing Traditions was the moldy copy I found on the bookshelf at Pangaia. I became familiar with the vitalist traditions of fresh air, sun, and fasting. There were lots of (very innocent) naked work parties. And, you guessed it, I got into the raw meat thing, along with tons of butter, goat milk, eggs, and other animal foods I hadn’t eaten in years.

And over the time I lived on Hawai’i, some amazing shit happened to my mind and body.

I felt good. Like, good good. I realized I hadn’t ever felt this way, and looking back, the nutrients I got from “going Primal” were feeding my hungry vegan bod in a way it had never been fed.

The spark of “holy shit, everyone needs to know about this” led me to eventually enroll in the Nutritional Therapy Association’s FNTP program a few years after moving back to the mainland from Hawai’i.

More education meant getting proved wrong

I knew—I just knew—that the saturated fats, raw milk and cheeses, and meat-heavy meals that made such a difference for me were what was missing from the lives of my ailing friends and families.

I was determined to learn the biochemical reasons behind why these foods were beneficial, so I could be Ms. Science Smartypants and prove it to them.

This is where the story gets less Indiana Jones and more Professor Jones.

Yep, I went to NTA. I even got hired as an instructor and curriculum creator.

Then, I went to graduate school for functional medicine and nutrition…and got hired to teach at that university.

 

But with each step of learning more about this thing that had drastically improved my life, the more I realized…I had been wrong.

 

Raw butter, milk, and meat were actually not what was missing from the lives of my (now totally over hearing about nutrition) friends and family…well, not most of them, anyway.

I had been out to prove myself right…

But I was lucky enough to have teachers who pointed me toward rational thinking, logical fallacies, and the study of bias and statistics.

So, instead of continuing down the rocky road of attempting to prove myself right, I could figure out what was most accurate.

My absolute 100% sureness about my diet of choice was a bias so strong it took me 10 years and a graduate degree to overturn.

 

What I learned was both exciting and a little scary: 

1. With the right tools, we have access to an incredible amount of information that can be individualized to our patients, incorporated into stellar content, and used to create thriving, people-first practices.

2. This rarely happens, as an Indiana Jones story has historically sold many more books than a Professor Jones one.

The goal and hidden gold of science-based marketing

Ultimately, science is not rock solid.

It is dynamic.

It is curious.

It is very f’ing hard to analyze and communicate.

And in many moments, it is, in fact, contradictory both to itself and to what we previously believed. ????

But this doesn’t mean we get to turn our backs on these realities and base our practices and marketing on “rock-solid” ideas that are anything but.

Our job as clinicians and business owners is to navigate the difficulty of dynamic science and weave it into a practical means of education and healing for our patients.

 

This applies to everything from our homepage web copy to our most intricate course curriculum.

And it’s not only for the good of their bodies but also their psyche—it does our potential patients no favors to be scared into a sale based on one-sided thinking. On the contrary.

This does get tricky because, as I said above, 1. science is hard, and 2. it’s much easier to sell a simplified, sure-to-get-clicks idea versus one with some honest caveats.

But, also, as I said above, it’s our job.

When we sign up to be health professionals, we sign up to be responsible for the people we serve. And yes, this includes our marketing!

 

We have the power to create marketing—blogs, newsletters, social posts, webinars, podcasts, etc.—that highlight accurate, reassuring, and practical information.

With a little finesse, we can make bias awareness trendy and updating our prior knowledge click-worthy.

We can let go of the strange, posturing stance that what we believed and based our earnings on yesterday is what we must believe tomorrow.

 

And instead, we can transparently serve our patients by communicating that we might be wrong sometimes.

And when we are, we’ll let them know.

And not only will we let them know, but we’ll also lead them through our learning process so they can learn and heal more effectively, too.

See how cool that is?

All of a sudden, the Professor Jones story is a little more exciting. And definitely profitable. 

For those who are wondering, yes, I still get down on some raw meat and milk now and again. I just don’t try to prove to anyone who will listen that it’s the end-all-be-all-cure-all diet. ????

Want more balanced takes on marketing and the wild world of wellness?

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